Analysis And Design Of A Piezoelectric Micro-actuator

Micro-grippers are usually fabricated of silicon using traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes and actuated based on thermal energy input causing their temperature to substantially increase and render unsuitable for certain applications such as biological tissue handling. In this research work, the design of a micro-gripper using piezoelectric ceramics (PZT) is presented as an alternative to silicon based micro gripper. The design procedure utilized ANSYS, a Finite Element Method based software tool to verify simple PZT models and subsequently evaluate the stroke for a family of configurations. The configurations were further explored and optimized considering that the fabrication would be performed using the femtosecond laser micro machining system available in our laboratory for further testing and characterization.